Sunday, January 20, 2008

The Liberation

Last weekend I visited my relatives in Virginia. Their large family spent four miserable years in one of Saddam's jails because one of their older sons, who was forced to fight against Iran, decided to defect. I wrote about their story in my first post. Their son Rasool fled Iraq in 1991 and moved to Germany. His brother Haider joined him a few years later. The parents left Iraq in 1992 and moved to the Washington, DC, area to live with their oldest son, who left Iraq in the 70s. Their two remaining sons left Iraq in 2003 and moved to Virginia. They worked hard, saved money and now own a small restaurant. Rasool and Haider spent the Christmas break in the US, so I decided to visit them for a weekend. I had not seen Haider since 1980, before he was imprisoned. I was 11 years old, and he was 10. When I saw him last weekend, we didn't recognize each other. We talked a lot about Iraq and the war. Rasool and Haider spent a month in Iraq in 2004 - they helped rebuild their relatives' home, which was damaged by US bombing in 2003 (nobody was injured during the bombing). Rasool saw some US soldiers mistreating Iraqis - he described an incident in which an American soldier threw an Iraqi on the ground and and stepped on his head - it was not clear what the Iraqi had done wrong. This incident and reports of rude behavior and theft during the searches of homes left Rasool with a negative image of the US military, but they all agree that the US invasion and occupation was necessary and ultimately good for Iraq. In fact they do not call it an invasion - they call it a liberation.

Baghdad in 2000: "A woman known as Um Haydar was beheaded reportedly without charge or trial at the end of December 2000. She was 25 years' old and married with three children. Her husband was sought by the security authorities reportedly because of his involvement in Islamist armed activities against the state. He managed to flee the country. Men belonging to Feda'iyye Saddam came to the house in al-Karrada district and found his wife, children and his mother. Um Haydar was taken to the street and two men held her by the arms and a third pulled her head from behind and beheaded her in front of the residents. The beheading was also witnessed by members of the Ba'ath Party in the area. The security men took the body and the head in a plastic bag, and took away the children and the mother-in-law. The body of Um Haydar was later buried in al-Najaf. The fate of the children and the mother-in-law remains unknown."